The day the crown was placed on his head in St. Peter’s Basilica, no one in the congregation dared to breathe. Pope Leo III had just done what no man had done in over three hundred years: he had crowned a new Emperor of the Romans, and that emperor was Charlemagne. But the road to that Christmas morning in 800 was paved with blood, betrayal, and a son who once plotted to tear his own father’s head from his shoulders.
Charlemagne had been born into greatness. The eldest son of Pippin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, he carried the name of his grandfather, Charles Martel, the warrior who had stopped the Moorish advance at Tours. Some chroniclers said he was born in 742, others in 748, but they all agreed on one thing: this child was destined to reshape the world. Raised in his father’s wandering court, he learned battle tactics and diplomacy instead of grammar, yet still mastered several languages and understood Greek.
By 760, while his father still ruled, Charlemagne was already signing royal charters in his own name. When Pippin the Short died on September 24th, 768, the kingdom was split between two brothers. Charlemagne was anointed at Noyon, and his younger brother Carloman took his own coronation at Soissons on the very same day. They shared a crown but not a kingdom.
Charlemagne ruled the north and east from Austrasia, while Carloman governed Burgundy and Aquitaine. The peace between them was as fragile as the borders they drew. Before his royal wedding, Charlemagne had taken a noblewoman named Himiltrude as a companion. Whether they ever married remains unclear, but their union produced a son, Pippin, a boy who would later be nicknamed the Hunchback.
At the time, the child was simply another heir, although he would one day become the greatest threat his father ever faced. In 770, Charlemagne’s mother Bertrada arranged a political marriage to secure peace with Lombardy. Her son dutifully wed Desiderius’s daughter, a woman history remembers only as Desiderata. The union was cold, brief, and entirely driven by politics, but it set the stage for a conflict that would define his reign.
The joint rule with his brother did not last. On December 4th, 771 , Carloman died suddenly, leaving Charlemagne to claim the entire Frankish kingdom for himself. He marched straight into his brother’s lands and forced Carloman’s widow Gerberga and her children to flee to Lombardy for protection. No one, however, was safe from Charlemagne.
He cast aside Desiderius’ daughter and married Hildegard, the daughter of Count Gerald, one of Carloman’s most powerfule nobles. The marriage solidified his grip on power. In 772 , Charlemagne turned his gaze eastward to the wild lands of the Saxons. They had been raiding Frankish borders for generations, but this king did not play nice like his ancestors.
He destroyed a sacred Saxon site and carried off their gold and silver. The fight, however, was far from over. This first campaign was only the beginning of a conflict that would stretch on for more than three decades, longer than most men of the time lived. From 772 to 804, Charlemagne waged nearly continuous war against the Saxons, baptizing, exiling, or executing anyone who refused to bend the knee to Christ or to him.
While Charlemagne crushed the Saxons, Desiderius began plotting his revenge against his former son-in-law, conspiring with Carloman’s heirs. But when Pope Adrian I called on Charlemagne for help against Desiderius’ Lombards, the Frankish king saw his opportunity. He assembled his armies and crossed the Alps in 773, laying siege to the Lombard capital of Pavia. By June 774, the Lombards were starving and sick.
Desiderius’ men sensed their defeat and surrendered without much of a fight. Charlemagne made himself king of the Lombards and turned Italy into a Frankish province. The celebrations had barely finished when Charlemagne went back on campaign. In 776, he returned to the eastern front to crush yet another Saxon uprising, burning villages and forcing entire tribes to accept baptism.
Converts received mercy, rebels received the sword. The following year, he summoned Franks and newly conquered Saxons to a mass assembly at Paderborn. Many Saxons pledged loyalty, but one man refused: Widukind, a defiant chieftain who slipped north into Denmark to regroup. In 781, Charlemagne and his wife Hildegard traveled to Rome with their children.
Pope Adrian baptized young Carloman, renamed him Pippin, and crowned both Pippin and Louis. With that act, Charlemagne was now a king among kings. But tragedy soon followed. Hildegard passed during childbirth along with her newborn namesake.
Grief-stricken, Charlemagne ordered daily masses for her soul, but just months later, he lost his mother Bertrada too. He did not linger long in mourning. By the end of 783, he had remarried, this time to Fastrada, a daughter of an East Franksh noble. Their union strengthened his hold on the eastern frontier, where his feud with the Saxons still raged on.
Then, an old enemy returned. Widukind came back from exile in Denmark, rallying the Saxons to his side and ambushing a Franksh force, dealing a crushing blow. He thought he had scored a victory, but he had only poked the bear. When word reached Charlemagne of Widukind’s surprise attack, he stormed to Verden at the head of an army.
Widukind fled, but the Saxon nobles, fearing reprisal, hand over thousands of captives. Instead of forgiveness, Charlemagne ordered 4,500 Saxon captives to be execuced in a single day. History would call it the Massacre of Verden. Even centuries later, the stain from the blood of those 4,500 captives sullied his reputation.
Charlemagne’s word was every bit as brutal as his sword. To cement control over Saxony, he issued the capitulation of parts of Saxony, a decree with no mercy in it. Pagans who refused baptism or practiced their old rites faced execuction. Charlemagne wanted to erase Saxon culture from Europe altogether, and he very nearly succeeded.
By 785, after years of devastation, Charlemagne had finally subdued Saxony. When Widukind emerged once more, the king offered him peace and baptism. In a grand ceremony, Charlemagne himself served as godfather to his former nemesis. The Saxon battles were over, but the empire building had just begun.
With the Saxons defeated, Charlemagne looked else where for expansion. He marched into Benevento, forcing Duke Arechis to flee to Salerno. Before long, Arechis submitted, offering his loyalty and his own son as a hostage. Charlemagne accepted with a smile, having added yet another crown to his collection.
While in Italy, Charlemagne met envoys from Constantinople, the seat of power in the Eastern Roman Empire. But the meeting did not go well. Empress Irene had convened the Second Council of Nicaea without inviting Charlemagne or any Franksh bishops. Feeling slighted, Charlemagne broke off his daughter ‘s engagement to her son, Emperor Constantine the Sixth.
The feud between the west and the east was heating up. Charlemagne wasn’t just about battles and beheadings. He issued a sweeping reform known as the general warning, demanding schools in every monastery and cathedral to ensure both priests and peasants could read scripture. After all, he needed someone to administer the lands he conquered, and he wasn’t done conquering.
He looked north to Bavaria, where his cousin Duke Tassilo ruled. The Duke had once been a loyal Franksh ally, but now his loyalty wavered. Charlemagne gathered his armies for an invasion, but before he could even yell charge, Tassilo surrendered. The feuds within his own family would get even worse.
No sooner than Charlemagne returned home did he hear rumors that Tassilo was plotting with the Avars, the nomadic warriors who ruled the Danubian plains. Charlemagne, never one to tolerate betrayal, deposed Tassilo and sent his cousin to a monastery, absorbing Bavaria into his kingdom. From his new base in Regensburg, he stomped out any opposition to his rule. In 792, Charlemagne faced an immense betrayal.
His eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback, turned on his father and plotted to overthrow him by any means. Bitter at being sidelined from the succession, he conspired with Bavarian nobles to kill his own father and brothers and pick the crowns from their severed heads. The plot was audacious and doomed from the start. Before his treacherous son could strike, Charlemagne’s spies exposed the conspiracy.
For his son ‘s co-conspirators, Charlemagne showed no mercy. He had them all put to the sword. But for the perfidious prince, Charlemagne was merciful, kind of. He banished his rebellious son to a monastery where only God could hear his schemes.
Even as his councils preached peace, Charlemagne returned to his old battlefield. From 794 to 799, he led yearly campaigns against the still defiant Saxons. Even his own chroniclers used words like burning, ravaging, devastating, and laying waste to describe them. He didn’t just beat the Saxons into submission; he replaced them.
After deporting thousands of Saxons to Francia, he let in thousands of loyal Franksh nobles to take their place. Near the frontier, he built his grand palace at Aachen, complete with a magnificent chapel that still stands today as part of Aachen Cathedral. His greatest accomplishment was still ahead. When Leo III became Pope in 795, enemies in Rome accused him of corruption.
They attacked him in the streets, nearly gouging out his eyes and ripping out his tongue. Bleeding and terrified, Leo III fled north to the one man who could restore his power, Charlemagne. Charlemagne was in the middle of another Saxon campaign when Leo III arrived at his camp, but the fleeing pope was not alone. Leo’s foes had followed and repeated their accusations in front of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne listened calmly, calculating his next move, then sent Leo back to Rome under royal guard. He wanted Leo III reinstalled in power, and perhaps a favor in return. In November 800, Charlemagne made his first move in his imperial plan. He met Pope Leo III near Mentana at the exact milestone where ancient Roman emperors began their ceremonial entrance into the eternal city.
He then oversaw the hearing of charges against Leo III, but made a shrewd proclamation declaring that no mere mortal could judge the guilt or innocence of the Pope. On December 23rd, Leo swore an oath declaring his innocence in all charges. With Leo III back in power, Charlemagne’s plan was almost complete. Two days later, on Christmas morning, Charlemagne and Pope Leo III stunned the parishoners gathered at St.
Peter’s Baasilica. Instead of a regular mass, they were about to witness the most pivotal moment in history since the fall of Rome. In a move that left everyone’s jaw on the floor, Pope Leo III placed a crown on Charlemagne’s head and called him Emperor of the Romans. The coronation made Charlemagne the first emperor in the west since Rome’s fall in 476.
From that day forward, he signed every royal document as Charles, most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great peaceful emperor governing the Roman Empire, and who is by the mercy of God king of the Franks and the Lombards. In 806, Charlemagne issued the division of the realm, laying out which of his sons would inherit which lands. The only thing he didn’t divide was the imperial crown. But his grand designs for his empire were not to be.
Pippin of Italy passed in 810. The father of Europe was left with one son and one last legacy to shape. His coronation as emperor put him in direct conflict with the Eastern Roman Empire. Instead of a destructive campaign, Charlemagne sought diplomacy.
He sent envoys to meet with Nikepohors, but the meeting never happened. Nikephoros fell in battle before the envoys could meet him. His successor, Michael I, was more receptive and sent his own emissaries to Aachen, officially recognizing Charlemagne as emperor. To mark the moment, Charlemagne minted coins bearing his new title, uniting two worlds under one name.
Charlemagne truly was the father of Europe, as in he might have fathered all of Europe, with at least 18 children, possibly 20. His dynastic line would stretch on through the ages. Curiously, however, none of his daughters ever married, though a few of them mothered children out of wedlock. Still, he could rest assured that his empire would live on.
On January 28th, 814, after seven decades of battles, diplomacy, and empire-building, Charlemagne’s body finally failed him. Stricken by fever and pleurisy, the great emperor whispered his famous last words, “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit. ”
The age of Charlemagne was over, but his legend had just begun. Long after his passing, royal houses across Europe traced their lineage back to him to legitimize their reign.
For centures, popes sought the protection of the Carolingian rulers. Even as his empire splintered, each nation traced its origins back to Charlemagne, truly making him the father of Europe.
